The Centralization-Decentralization Issue

Charles Wyplosz

No 14, European Economy - Discussion Papers from Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission

Abstract: The make-up of the EU institutions, and their evolution, should explicitly be based on widely accepted federalism principles. This paper applies federalism principles to a few crucial questions, mainly fiscal policy, fiscal discipline and structural reforms, using where possible lessons from existing federations. After introducing the topic, Section 2 briefly reviews the key message from the fiscal federalism literature. The following sections use these principles to examine a number of areas where centralization may be insufficient or excessive in the EU. Section 3 looks at public spending, both in the aggregate and my main functions. Taxes are examined in Section 4. The next section looks at the issue of fiscal discipline, a weak spot of the Eurozone. The allocation of policy competences, a key characteristic of the UE, is the object of Section 6. The last section concludes.

JEL-codes: E62 H1 H7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/publications/ ... tralization-issue_en (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:euf:dispap:014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in European Economy - Discussion Papers from Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ECFIN INFO ().